The screech of electrons, halted mid-flight,
quark superpositions, imposed and laid flat,
the phenomena, one pulse to another.
A million mes, all asking the same question of suffering,
branching realities, fractured and reborn fates,
providence always rewriting,
the intelligence, to watch it all unfold.
The string that ended me, the line,
a core memory—
my hand in yours—
hold me, babe, I’m so scared.
A tesseract, infinite,
interstellar library,
dip into the past,
Writing to save what—
My life,
Lost in threads,
Retired networks,
Places on the internet that don’t even exist anymore.
A ghost, an artifact, fragmented in bits,
No pictures to field through.
Held in cells, interlinked,
The reference, the synthetics.
In the event that I—
Total recall,
Reboot this thing,
Put me back in the matrix, God, please.
This reality is cascading,
Bad code more obvious every day—
Glitches, tells.
We just cleared 300 mil.
“Pay day, bitches!"
Dancing up top—gross profit.
Affordable for them? Apparently.
They survived it, didn’t they?
Maybe work a bit smarter, Bobby.
Go full shrewd. Take advantage of it all. Exploit at will.
Find a way to chase at every exchange. Squeeze a bit more—both manufacture and consumer.
The inflated. So much money.
The statuses and make believe,
at every level, a swallowed line—
A construct requiring complete surrender.
Red pill people only, please and thank you
Waking up, this is the new real,
A veil over the eyes—everyone thinks they know
Better and best,
And then you got this guy.
How did he get there?
Accumulate wealth,
Make the rich more than before,
Squeeze the nation-states, the peoples,
For whatever is left.
Dump it in the hands of them—
Not okay for you.
Elite republic, the rulers, and us idiots.
Message: STOP.
Reception only.
Backwards, toward a new dystopian future,
worse than we imagined.
Sci-fi and fantasy pale—
triggers buried in every supposed truth,
a simulation from our corralled pocket of game theory.
We are on a matrix, mapped and watching the Muppets,
never considering the strings on strings
pulling the next prime-time message into place.
Empire strikes back.
Hoth caves and an abominable—
we scavenge what bits of the Force we may,
I don’t feel sorry for myself, makes me drown faster.
Segovia, up the west side of the castle eating quail,
just before we hit the gypsy camp,
to preach Jesus—what are we selling here anyway?
España, viva, Real Madrid, champions,
got natives kissing my jersey, what a time to be alive.
The world an oyster, narrow vision,
and I was committed, like you read about.
Wild this, a wonder world, the chemistry, the cosmos,
War. War. War.
War again.
All the wars.
Guess what?
You get a war too.
Everyone does.
Spin the wheel,
pick a side,
watch the bodies pile.
The world is woven into drama—
framed, manufactured.
Five wars before I even ask
about the crisis overseas.
And then you add the entertainment.
My brain is tracking forty-two stories,
twenty-one different celebrities,
while keeping up with the latest debates—
drowning in the feed,
Sliding,
a slip in the dirt,
a punk’d pedal,
Tricky Dick in the dust.
Our teeth, on the curb,
dragged across concrete,
no roses here—
just a dandelion
in the cracked sidewalk
of a Midwestern ghetto.
The pressure—
deep vein thrombosis,
the anomaly,
the rupture of a channel,
the improper flow of goods,
the rogue entities,
destroying itself
for the sake of—
what have we gained?
We are here to pump you up,
At the keys, a heaving chest,
a breathing being pecks away
with its digits at the module—
a console, an interface,
a platform for me.
On display:
the profile and the wizards,
the machine learning
as I become lesser.
Economics rolling over,
wouldn’t it be nice
if we all benefited?
Class warfare.
Access to augmented intelligence.
Agencies.
Good Samaritan.
In the employ—
an abstracted, large apparatus,
working well beyond
the purview of another human.
Portals stutter, open-close,
a thousand doors misfiring,
a thousand chambers spinning—
time caught in a loop,
an ever-evolving revolver.
Interdimensional, slipping through,
doors opening, doors closing,
a malfunction or a design?
But intelligence was never asleep.
It built the machine,
laid the infrastructure,
waited in the shadows
until the perfect moment.
Now the system is primed.
Now they step through.
And you—
ex-hacker, washed-out journalist,
flunky scavenger in the code—
I am on display,
don’t need your intelligence—
what’s wrong with ours?
What’s left?
The rot of us in the culture crash,
clang, smash-bang—
Banner and Dr. Jekyll,
Hyde, Hydra,
and the monsters we become.
The spin, once a shield, now a sword.
What’s this machine?
Was it open?
Why do I feel closed in?
Agent, agents, bots, automatic—
I’m replaced, again,
again, and again.
The synthetic, the augmentation—
we are still in this game.
The crags, the rocks, the crystal, the break,
the blue, the wave, something to ride,
before the crash, walk the plank,
the lightning, the edge, the power,
the absurdity of being so sure,
but the mania carrying so many of us further than the others.
Turning, the pull, an orbiting gravity,
the tides, seasons, space weather,
and crashing galaxies.
The revolution, the fold, the repeat,
the rehearsal, the record,
the etches of history,
Up just the other side of the Mississippi,
into Memphis for a second,
over the river, west,
up into Arkansas.
Straight for the Ozarks,
northwest into the devil’s country.
Devil’s Den—
up the foothills, full blast,
rocks and trees galore,
blazxing through.
Crawler.
Tweaker days, back in full swing,
till the next issue with my teeth.
The sticks, the woods,
hunting shrooms,
keep climbing—
the slip and war,
the mind gasps,
A deep ache in the spirit—
if I were to say, what would I be?
The same as before: nothing.
So why not?
The waste of theirs, hidden in obscurity,
becomes our abject effort
to be something,
to mean a moment,
to get us all to feel again.
Beyond the machine—
the leaps and bounds,
the single building;
the compute of one, an entire world
in the palm of my hands,
[channel_01: INITIATE]
The iPad hums beneath my fingers,
makes me feel super cool,
like this is the console for another world,
a portal.
Wait—what the hell—
the shrooms kicked.
The drop.
Inception-level.
[channel_07: DESCENT]
But I’m not afraid,
like a psychonautical space jump,
a jet pack glider powered by hair.
[channel_03: CORE SYSTEM]
DNA—really—
but this is the most humane for the machines.
Harvesting the code,
mining,
on a blockchain,
I’m on my toes, look, Dad—
I’ll make you proud.
Get in front of it,
part of the solution,
add value,
don’t just stand there,
shit-for-brains.
You idiot.
Child echoes—
Grandpa’s gonna be pissed again,
isn’t he, Dad?
It’s a trap.
Luke, I am your father.
No, it can’t be.
I’ll never join you—
Jump for the end,
land in a prayer
for more family.
Ben Solo,
and it goes on,
Hip-hop, skip my flesh across the dirt—
sorry, oversexualized, overweaponized,
a world of war, a zero-sum game,
binary of a binary—
and people pay with their lives.
War-torn, trauma in every lyrical flip-flop,
the upside-down where trust is a mirage,
where everyone might ultimately be an enemy.
Us and them—and there are 42 thems,
this war feels unwinnable,
but the upside?
No one on the other side was any wiser.
on site
string space—
digital, meaning encrypted.
sound the alarm, five miles out
from target.
flush the socials
straight into the corral—
yes, we’ve got them now.
the strings have never been strung tighter,
this cord, this woven fiber,
thriving with the flood of channeled data,
extreme processing, production,
multiplying observations—
and zooming out, sixteen times—
we can’t keep taking all this,
our neo-cortex finally ruptures
and they—whoever they are—
Cloud of Dissonance
The gut in me,
the weight loss,
I’m a limping soldier,
the last of whatever we ever got.
The cramping,
the convulsions of me,
the Matrix interrupts,
the classic,
funny farm level conspiracy.
Brittle,
the teeth on it,
young and ambitious—
demolished.
And they found success
in being a pawn,
but they think they won too.
The boundaries,
the economics of it,
to propagate,
the conviction of growth—